This post is part 4 of a multi-part series on how to eliminate stress at work with strategies informed by modern scientific research and ancient philosophy. To get instant access to the complete series, as well as exclusive bonus content that I don’t share on the blog, click here to download the free guide.

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Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of strong leaders, each with their own unique work style and strengths. But for all their differences, there’s one trait I’ve observed that all of them share.

Emotional mastery.

No matter what the circumstance, the best leaders I’ve worked with never let the highs get them too high, or the lows get them too low. They consistently act rationally and logically, rather than following the pull of their emotions.

And as I’ve grown throughout my career, I’ve come to realize that without emotional mastery:

It doesn’t matter how skilled you are at your job

It doesn’t matter how strong your technical chops are

It doesn’t even matter how hard you work

Think about it. If you’re an emotionally wound-up ball of stress at work, research suggests you won’t be able to think clearly, or creatively.

If you’re prone to fear on the job, you’ll always be afraid of taking risks, of trying new things. When it comes time to choose what to do, or what to say, you’ll always choose the safe option, even if it’s not the right choice for your company or for your career.

And if you’re prone to righteous outbursts of anger, people aren’t going to want to work with you. Take it from the guy who once got so pissed off he slammed a chair into a wall in the middle of a meeting.

For most of my life I’ve worn my emotions on my sleeve. And as I’ve taken on more work and responsibility in my career, I’ve found myself more vulnerable to these types of counterproductive emotional states.

Here are three you can get started with – one to address anxiety, one for fear, and one for anger.

Strategy 1: Build a play habit

During a particularly nasty bout with stress and anxiety, I came across Charlie Hoehn’s Play it Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety, which completely redefined how I approach work-life balance. In sharing his personal struggles with anxiety, Charlie wrote something that could not have resonated more had I written it myself:

“For years, I’d mentally blocked myself from having guilt-free fun. I was a workaholic who was extremely adept at rejecting everything that wasn’t productive. I couldn’t enjoy any form of leisure if it didn’t earn money or help my career.”

My story was little better than Charlie’s. My Type-A personality had turned work, and the stress relief from work, into a mission-driven, soulless pursuit. It was making me miserable. Even when I made time for fun, it was purely for the purpose of recharging for more work. It was never fun for fun’s sake.

In Play it Away, Charlie speaks to the transformative impact that play had on his stress and anxiety. Having nothing to lose, I took his guidance, and built a “play ritual” into my days and my weeks.

Every day, I forced myself to do something I found fun, just for me, as a way of decompressing from work.

The results were astounding. Having fun alleviates stress. Who would have thought?

Even though the stresses my work created were no less demanding, my play ritual crushed the underlying anxiety that made stress so challenging to deal with.

Here are a few practical pointers to get the most out of “play”:

Actually play. Play isn’t synonymous with “taking a break.” You need to find activities that have a noticeable effect on your state. Watching TV doesn’t count. Neither does tricking yourself into thinking something like your workout counts as play if you’re not actually enjoying it.

Play every day, even when you “don’t have time.” It’s when it’s hardest to carve out time to play, when life is at its busiest and most stressful, that it’s most important to do so. Even 10-15 minutes can make a huge difference in your state, and the productivity benefits from that break are almost certain to outweigh the time lost, which means there’s really no excuse to not take that break.

Eliminate guilt. You can’t effectively reap the benefits of play if you’re plagued with a chronic sense of guilt while doing so. If you’re feeling guilty by playing, reframe your “play” to look at it the same way you think about eating, or sleeping, or exercise. You’d never feel “guilty” about these things, since they’re necessary to maintain your physical health. Similarly, look at play as necessary to support your emotional health.

What defines play? For everybody it’s different. For me, it’s lifting weights at the gym, or hiking with friends, or writing for my blog. Find your play, make time for it every day, and in no time, you’ll realize a marked reduction in anxiety.

Strategy 2: Fear-setting

Many people know Tim Ferriss for the productivity advice he’s shared on his blog and in his book The Four Hour Workweek. In my opinion, however, one of the most valuable things he’s spoken about has nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with emotional self-management.

In a recent TED talk, Tim discussed “fear-setting,” an exercise based on stoic philosophy designed to help people reduce and overcome their fears. It provides a helpful framework for analyzing our fears, enabling us to better manage them. This, in turn, helps eliminate the downstream stress that fear creates.

Here’s how it works:

Clearly define your fear, transforming your emotional gut reaction into words. Say, for example, you’re scheduled to deliver a big proposal for your team to the senior leadership at your company, and your fear of underperforming or messing up is creating stress. Here, you’d want to define every single thing you’re afraid might happen. For instance:

You might get asked a question you don’t know how to answer

Your proposal might get shot down by one of the attendees at the meeting

You might underperform, and the executives will think less of you

On and on and on. List it all out – even the craziest, most unlikely fears bouncing around in the back of your mind.

Put together a plan to proactively prevent each of your fears from manifesting. If you’re afraid of underperforming during the meeting, plan to put extra practice time into your presentation. If you’re afraid of getting surprised with questions you don’t know how to address, consider a pre-meeting with some of the attendees to understand their perspective and pre-emptively tailor your presentation in a way that addresses their concerns.

Imagine each fear occurring in vivid detail, in spite of your best efforts to prepare. From there, come up with a list of ways that you could repair the “damage” from each fear. So, say the presentation bombs. What options are at your disposal to repair your reputation, to get the project off the ground, or to fix whatever else might go wrong?

After analyzing what you can do to repair the situation, quantify on a scale of 1-10 (1 being no impact, 10 being death) how much your life would be permanently impacted. What you’ll find is the vast majority of things we fear happening in the workplace have minimal long-term impact. Even a fireable offense can be bounced back from – you can always get another job.

Sometimes, fear holds us back from taking action on something important. In those cases, Ferriss recommends that we contrast the impacts of the thing we fear coming to be (as defined in the fear-setting exercise above) with the impacts of not doing the thing. You may fear having a tough conversation with a coworker or your manager and put it off – but what does the future look like if you fail to do so? What is the cost of inaction?

Even when fear doesn’t hold us back from doing our best work our living our best lives, it can have a crippling impact on our stress levels. That’s why fear-setting is so important – because by eliminating the impact fear has on our state, you’ll not only make better decisions at work, but less stressed out while doing so.

Strategy 3: Radical acceptance

Some experience stress as fear, others as anxiety, but for me, it’s always been anger. When things don’t go my way, my natural inclination is to get angry. Like, “hulk smash” angry.

At its core, anger and frustration result when we experience a gap between our expectations and reality. You expected a colleague to deliver something to you on time – and it’s late. You wanted your new marketing campaign to drive incredible results – and it fell flat.

For me, dealing with anger and frustration at work has been one of the biggest roadblocks on my journey toward a stress-free work life. So it’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve.

And to be honest, it’s not something I’ve completely mastered.

As a self-professed hothead, the best way I’ve found for dealing with anger is what I call “the acceptance strategy,” which calls for accepting your anger at a situation and working with it more productively.

Here’s how it works:

When you have control over what angers you:

Channel the anger into a constructive solution. Anger and frustration, used appropriately, can be a powerful tool for generating internal motivation and driving change. After all, it’s frustration with the status quo drives entrepreneurs and innovators to start companies to make the world a better place. It’s frustration with our society that inspires revolutionaries to lead movements for social change. When you’re upset with how something transpires at work, don’t just stew – get to work on fixing the problem, using your anger as fuel.

When you don’t have control over what angers you:

Readjust your expectations. For things that aren’t in our control, using anger to spin our wheels is counter-productive, since if it’s not something that’s in our control, then failed attempts to control it will just lead to more anger and frustration. The only rational response when something infuriating happens that’s outside of your control is to accept your anger instead of fighting it, and accept the reality of the situation, instead of holding on to “what should be.”

Any given frustrating situation has its own mix of controllable and uncontrollable elements. Use the acceptance strategy to concentrate that frustration on things you can control, and for the things you can’t, accept reality, instead of further frustrating yourself by refusing to accept reality.

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Different people experience stress differently. But make no mistake – the resultant anxiety, fear, and anger share the same root cause. On the flip side, because of that, each of these strategies can be applied as a panacea to any emotional “symptom” of stress, because each of them addresses stress at its roots.

Emotional self-management can be tough, especially for people like me, who run hot. I’ve found that it’s typically the most passionate and driven people, who are most invested in success, who struggle the most with emotional self-management. For most people, their emotions are a double-edged sword. Overinvestment in work can produce tremendous results, but it can also yield stress-inducing anxiety, fear, and anger.

Which is why it’s important to implement habits and strategies to get ahead of these emotions. Doing so can allow you to realize the benefits to your work that emotional investment can provide, without suffering from the stress-inducing, work-compromising, misery-generating downside.

This post is part 3 of a multi-part series on how to eliminate stress at work with strategies informed by modern scientific research and ancient philosophy. To get instant access to the complete guide, as well as exclusive bonus content that I don’t share on the blog, click here to download the free guide.

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To be honest, I think that trying to “get more done” can be a bit of a waste of time. Instead of thinking about how much work you can cram into a day, it’s far better to focus on doing the right things, and doing them well.

But sometimes, regardless of how well you try and prioritize or negotiate your workload, you end up overwhelmed with too much stuff on your plate.

This leaves you with a few options, none of them good.

You can do some of the things on your to-do list while ignoring the things you can’t get to. This is bad, and will always end up biting you in the ass.

You can attempt everything done, but at a lower degree of quality. This is what many people end up unconsciously doing when they’re overwhelmed. Its also not a viable option — poor work sets you back in your career, undermines your professional reputation, and is generally a waste of everybody’s time.

You can sacrifice your time (and sanity) to get everything done in a quality manner, no matter how many cups of coffee and missed hours of sleep it takes. This is the option most Type-A people opt for. It works well in the short run, but creates unhealthy stress that ultimately ends up undermining the quality of your work (and not to mention the quality of your life) in the long run.

The best way to deal with the problem of overwhelm is to avoid it all together. And the best way to do that is to develop a style of working that refines your focus and optimizes how you spend mental energy, so that you can deliver higher quality work more quickly.

The strategy I’ve found that works best for this is something I call closed-loop productivity.

Introducing closed-loop productivity

Closed-loop productivity is a style of working designed to concentrate as much of your mental resources as possible on your work — and not the distractions that are part and parcel of office life.

To understand how it works, it’s important to understand “open loops”, and how they sap mental energy. For example, say you’re about to checking your email in the morning, about to head into a meeting, and see a note from a customer that you need to respond to by the end of the week. Without the time to address the email then and there, doing so gets put off to a later point in time.

From the time that responding to the email emerges as something to be dealt with to the time you actually answer it, it sits in the back of your mind, an open loop waiting to be closed. Each time you think about the email — how you’re going to respond, when you’re going to find time to do so — without having answered it, represents an “open loop.” Given that the mind has a limited number of things it can focus on at any one time, too many “open loops” leave us unable to focus clearly on whatever task is at hand, and leave us mentally drained at the end of the day.

“Open loops” are so mentally taxing and problematic to productivity that entire productivity systems, such as Getting Things Done and Kanban have been built around the principle of closing these open loops and minimizing “work-in-progress.”

To understand, consider the Zeigarnik effect, which refers to our mind’s natural tendency to focus on incomplete tasks. As Cal Newport explains in his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, the Zeigarnik effect “tells us that if you simply stop whatever you are doing at five p.m. and declare, ‘I’m done with work until tomorrow,’ you’ll likely struggle to keep your mind clear of professional issues, as the many obligations left resolved in your mind will, as in Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments, keep battling for your attention throughout the evening.”

The Zeigarnik effect, a product of open loops, not only hinders your mind from effectively doing your work by distracting you with other unresolved tasks, but it also impedes on mental recovery when you’re not in the office by flooding your mind with thoughts of work after hours.

Understood accordingly, open loops create two distinct problems when it comes to stress and overwhelm.

Open loops reduce your productivity by taking focus away from whatever you’re working on at a given point in time. When you’re less productive, you either lower the quality of your work, increase the amount of time you need to spend working, or increase the number of things piling up on your to-do list, leading to increased overwhelm.

Per the Zeigarnik effect, open loops limit your ability to recharge when you are not at work, leaving less mental energy in the tank when you get into the office.

Closed-loop productivity is designed to strike at the root of these challenges.

Eliminating open loops with closed loop productivity

The idea behind closed loop productivity is to focus as much of your energy on closing open loops — resolving unresolved tasks — before taking on new work. This maximizes the amount of your mental energy that can be concentrated on your work, giving you a fighting chance against feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list.

Here are my 3 favorite strategies for minimizing the negative impact of open loops:

Strategy #1: Follow the 2 minute rule

You may be familiar with the “five-second rule” — if you drop food on the floor, you’re ‘allowed’ to pick it back up and eat it as long as it hasn’t touched the floor for longer than five seconds.

While I personally find this to be a bit unhygienic, I’m a fan of the five-second rule’s distant relative, the “2 minute” to-do rule.

Here’s how it works: whenever you’re presented with something you need to do, whether it’s to make a phone call, or send an email, or answer a question from a coworker — if it would take less than 2 minutes to do, do it immediately.

I know this contrasts with a lot of productivity advice that emphasizes focusing energy on the important and non-urgent, high-impact items above all else. And while that guidance can be directionally correct, if enough non-important or non-urgent half-finished tasks crowd our to-do list, they can crowd away focus from the bigger, important thing we’re trying to focus on. Since you have to do it all anyway, it’s better to complete the small tasks upfront, clearing your mind before setting it onto your big projects.

Strategy #2: “Capture” all of your to-dos in an easy-to-reference framework

The Getting Things Done productivity system (and many others) rightfully emphasize “capture” as a core tenet for doing more while stressing less, and for good reason. “Capture” — consciously noting down things that need to be done on some iteration of a to-do list — helps make more efficient use of mental resources in a number of ways.

First, it removes the mental burden of having to remember everything you need to do. It doesn’t matter if you’re mentally capable of remembering everything without writing it down — it’s that, even if you’re able to do so, in doing so, you’re consuming valuable mental resources that could be better deployed elsewhere.

Second, organizing captured tasks on a list removes the cognitive burden of having to decide what to do and when to do it. Countless studies show that choice-making of any type (from deciding how you approach a meeting to deciding which sandwich you want to grab for lunch) leads to a phenomenon called “Decision fatigue,” which drains willpower and energy to do work. Being able to simply refer to a list of things to do removes choice from the equation, enabling energy that would otherwise be spent on deciding what to do to be invested in the things themselves.

Entire books have been written about the best way to practice capture. If you just want to get started, using something as simple as a pen-and-paper to-do list will make a world of difference compared to trying to keep everything organized in your own head. For something a little bit more robust, I’m a fan of the Personal Kanban system, which combines capture with a means of tracking “work in progress,” enabling you to visualize your open loops, so that you can structure your work in a way that minimizes them.

Or, if you’d like to go all out on capture, you could leverage the Getting Things Done system, which calls for to-dos to be captured and run through a complex flowchart to help prioritize when and how to do it.

The important thing is that you find a capture system that works best for you, so that you can consistently implement it throughout your work and realize the benefits of closed-loop productivity.

Strategy #3: Shutdown rituals

Closing loops within the course of a work day is important — but what do you do when you finish the day and you still have things left undone? For any project or initiative that spans across days (or months, or years), the Zeigarnik effect ensures that we’re going to be left with open loops that our minds wrestle with over the course of the evening.

In response to this tendency for the mind to hold onto work after hours, Cal Newport recommends in Deep Work to build a shutdown ritual to support more effective post-work mental recharging.

As Newport explains, ‘decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of deep work.”

A shutdown ritual, to be performed at the end of the busy work day, facilitates this rest by freeing the mind from its natural inclination to dwell on incomplete tasks.

Newport recommends a shutdown ritual that consists of:

Checking email one last time to ensure there are no urgent messages that must be responded to (and to provide yourself with the psychological comfort that there’s nothing you’ve ‘missed’)

Writing down any outstanding tasks on the mind (and optionally, next steps or actions to take for the following day)

Skimming the entire to-do list, and reviewing the next few days on the calendar

Creating a high-level plan for the next day

I like to supplement this shutdown routine by writing down whatever stressful thoughts are running through my mind, and actions I can take (or mental frameworks I can adopt) to resolve these stressors. This helps further free the mind from the worries of the day and enable it to more effectively recharge.

Putting it all together

When you implement closed-loop productivity, a lot of goodness follows. Practiced over the course of a work week (and indeed, over a career), closed-loop productivity unlocks an abundance of mental energy that transforms the most of overwhelming of workloads into something much more manageable.

By getting more quality work done with the same amount of time, you reduce workplace stress, which in turn puts you in a better state for getting more quality work done in the future.

And it’s not even that hard! To recap, all you need to do to get started is:

Follow the 2 minute rule: For anything that takes less than 2 minutes, do it NOW instead of making a plan to do it later

Capture your to dos! Whether you choose to use pen and paper, or a tool like Asana or Trello, the important thing is that you’re offloading the burden of remembering from your mind.

Build in a shutdown ritual. Just like your muscles need to recover after a hard workout, so too does your brain after a long day at work. The better your rest, the better your work — and shutdown rituals can help your brain turn “off” work so you can recover.

Ultimately, these strategies help you get more quality work done with the same amount of time by making better use of your finite mental energy. Doing so enables you to address overwhelm at its roots, eliminating the stress that’s caused by “too much to do.”

Of course, you have the 3Fs: family, food, and football – which just so happen to be three of my favorite things.

But even more than the celebration and indulgence that go hand in hand with Thanksgiving, what I really love is the holiday’s emphasis on gratitude. Unlike, say, birthdays, or Christmas, where we look forward to the gifts we will receive, Thanksgiving provides an opportunity to express gratitude for what we already have.

Yet, one need only look to how we celebrate Thanksgiving today to understand why practicing gratitude is becoming harder and harder.

This post is part 2 of a multi-part series on how to eliminate stress at work with strategies informed by modern scientific research and ancient philosophy (Part 1 can be found here). To get instant access to the complete series, as well as exclusive bonus content that I don’t share on the blog, click here to download the free guide.

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As a compulsive Type-A personality, I’ve researched and tested virtually every productivity “hack” and stress reduction strategy under the sun. And after years of research and testing, what I’ve discovered is that, quite frankly – most advice on reducing stress and increasing productivity is horseshit.

Tell me if you’ve heard any of these gems before:

Limit your to-do list to more than one (or three, or five) important things before (which would be nice if I got to pick and choose what I wanted to work on, instead of having tens, or hundreds of to-dos handed down from higher up on the corporate food chain)

Ignore the urgent and unimportant in favor of the non-urgent and important (which assumes that I alone, not my team or my managers, get to decide what is classified as urgent or important)

Check your email only once or twice a day (which, face it, is only realistic if you’re a “lifestyle entrepreneur” or you work for the Amish)

This post is part 1 of a multi-part series on how to eliminate stress at work with strategies informed by modern scientific research and ancient philosophy. To get instant access to the complete series, as well as exclusive bonus content that I don’t share on the blog, click here to download the free guide.

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When I went into sales I threw my everything into it. Waking up at 5, working til 8pm or later, Monday through Friday, and working 5-10 hours on Sunday to prepare for the week.

The result? My performance was squarely, disappointingly in the middle of the pack.

I knew something had to change. So I set up some time to shadow with two of our company’s most successful reps.

They worked 35, MAYBE 40 hours a week. And, they weren’t working more “productively” – making more calls, or serving more customers – during those hours. Yet, they were raking it in. And they had fun doing it!

WTF!!!

Their success flew in the face of everything I knew about what it took to be successful. I thought that to be successful, you had to cram as much into your day as possible, to clock in early and to stay late, and to take on as many extra projects as you can.